White
by Reyn
Summary: It is something unavoidable; something you can never truly escape. It lives within your being, climbs inside your veins, clutches at your heart, and seeps into your soul. And it becomes a part of you." Love, realisations, and endings. Mild HD slash.


Disclaimer: Characters property of J.K. Rowling, et al.   
  
This is mild Harry/Draco slash. Venture elsewhere if it is not your drift. Thanks.  
  
--  
  
The snow falls softly; silently, filling the field with miniature glazed crystals, and painting it an endless moor of white. I stand and gaze at it, marveling at how the layers of white touch the slaughter of war, how white mixes with red, how red bleeds into the white.  
  
But eventually, more white falls, and the red is coated, and disappears from view. I bend down and touch the flakes, running my hands on it, languishing its brilliant purity, its painful flawlessness.  
  
*  
  
It is something unavoidable; something you can never truly escape. It lives within your being, climbs inside your veins, clutches at your heart, and seeps into your soul. And it becomes a part of you.  
  
It starts off simply. At the start, it even seems that you can evade it. And looking back, it certainly may have been possible, if I had tried to thwart it. I had done nothing. But even without nurture, without sunning, it grows within itself--manifests itself inside you--and all too soon you can't even remember living without it, can't even think what it was once like to breathe without it in you.   
  
But even with the pain that has intertwined itself with my being--even with all that happened since, would I go back and take the other path, and not love him? I cannot think about this.  
  
I already know the answer, and I don't like it.  
  
I would not.  
  
Because I can no longer imagine what it would be to live without this feeling, without him touching my thoughts every minute of the day. I can't imagine life without the torturous pain in the truth that he will never see me the way that I see him. I can no longer be without loving him.  
  
Which is exactly why I cannot be with it.  
  
I remember the one time he had looked at me without malice. Goyle, in just another moment of idiocy, had tripped him as he was walking to his seat during Potions. Those fool's glasses he always wore had clattered to the ground, and I had leant down, picked them up, and handed them back to him.   
  
And in that flash of weakness, in that slip of a moment when we had both forgotten what he was supposed to be to me and me to him, he had looked bewilderedly at me and half-smiled. And it was in that same moment that I had understood. Understood that I could never be free of this, never escape it--that the pain would stay with me until the day I was to die.  
  
I could not live with the pain.  
  
*  
  
He is there, just as I had known he would be. Standing there, and he gazes at me with a serenity that I cannot comprehend. I don't try to. I don't look at him.  
  
I don't even think. I simply reach into my robes, whip out my wand, point it at him and say, as if it is a practiced art, "Avada Kedavra."   
  
My hands are shaking. I don't understand what's happening. I don't even know what I am doing, what I have done. I can only stumble and crawl pathetically to him, a clutch on my heart, and as I reach him I cling onto his arm, lying next to him, as if I am not the one who had just sent him to his death. As if--  
  
He's not gone yet. Trust him to be able to hang on. But he's always been the exception. His breath is coming in short gasps, his body is spasming; I look into his brilliant green eyes, and they shine with a radiance I have never seen before, not even in him. I clutch his arm tighter and refuse to remove my gaze from his. And as we look at each other with such an honesty so true that it is painful, I can see his terror, his peace, his understanding, but most of all, I know his love.  
  
I have known pain since as long as I can remember, but nothing has ever felt like this.  
  
Then he coughs, and it is over. No final words. No dramatic ending. It's just finished.  
  
I let go of his arm, and carefully brush the snow off my robes. I pause for a minute, before I gingerly reach out to painstakingly remove the glasses off his face. I have never noticed the dents on the frames. I look to his face again.  
  
His eyes are still open, but their green has faded, their lustre dead.  
  
I blink.  
  
And the pain is gone.  
  
--  
  
Review and I will love you forever. :) 


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